Colonizers

In the tragic hilarious and eminently watchable movie Mickey 17 the invasion of a planet and the attack on the superintelligent native species (dismissively labelled "critters") is best exemplified by the capture of a baby critter by the humans. The curiosity for interspecies understanding is limited to, well, cutting off the tail of the said critter, putting it in a blender, and then saying "what sauce does this best go with?"

Irreverent, wildly unpredictable, and in the end hopefully, Mickey 17 is an original movie that traverses sci fi, humour, dystopia - and holds well

16/20

Revenge served cold

The Count of Monte Cristo is a tale synonymous with revenge and known to all and sundry. So the 2024 French rendition has to live up to a high degree of thespianism and emotional intensity - and it does, by and large. Edmond Dantes (Pierre Niney) son of the stable hand finds himself separated from his lady love Mercedes (Anais Demoustier) and - just like that - he gets labelled as a Bonapartist and ends up in the dread of Chateau d'if. An encounter over years with one Abbe Faria leads to a second coming and just desserts to Villefort (Laurent Laffite), de Morceau (Bestien Bouillon) and Danglars (Patrick Mille). Sans some sympathy for the attachment of the younger Morceau with Haydee (Anamaria Vartolomei) the new Count is as decisive and ruthless as the circumstances that brought him to the brink of extinction 

Available on Amazon Prime 

15.5/20